Besides, Rove said, Palin will not be able to escape the media’s attention.

“If she thinks somehow that she’s going to be able to protect her family against the kind of things that she’s suffered over the last couple of months, from David Letterman and others, and seek a role of leadership for effective change for our country, as she said in her speech, she’s not going to be able to do it,” Rove said.

Can’t really disagree there, although to act like Palin has “suffered” in a way any politician hasn’t is asinine. And seriously I’m going to belt someone in the face if they bring up Letterman again. After Limbaugh outright called Chelsea a dog and McRage said she’s so ugly because “her father is Janet Reno”, a comedian joking about the fact that Palin’s daughter did in fact get knocked up is pretty tame. So… shut the hell up, Turdblossom.

Will and I have things narrowed down to basically three ways of looking at this, none of which are good.

1. She’s fleeing before more corruption scandals hit. Possible, but I don’t think necessarily likely. However, it’s not outside the realm of possibility and shows she’s too corrupt to be credible.
2. She’s just bailing because she can’t handle the pressure any more. Very possible, and indicates that she’s terribly thin-skinned. If anything, this strikes me as the most probable if her horrific overreaction to a late-night comic’s jokes cause her to have shit fits.
3. She just plain ran away with no explanation. Ignoring the reason, the fact is that Palin dropped out with 18 months left in her term and didn’t say why. Maybe there is some noble purpose, but if you just peace out with no warning you’re a flake. Period.

What’s infuriating now is that people like Andrew “why do I have a column” Breitbart are blaming the gah-damn media for all of this.

Miss Dowd’s attempted takedown of Mrs. Palin is less skillful surgery than it is name calling using fun noun and adjective pairings. Think “Mad Libs.” And, that’s exactly what Misses Dowd, Couric and Fey are. Once the ladies did their job, liberal men like Jon Stewart and David Letterman had the cover to join the hate campaign.

Mean ol’ Katie Couric. The conservatives have never forgiven her for asking unfair questions like “what papers do you read?” and “how are you doing today?”. And also how dare Tina Fey do an impression of her! It’s not like SNL ever had anyone else give an unflattering portrayal of a presidential candidate. Or had Will Ferrel play Janet Reno for a few years.

I have to say, as a side note, this is some serious “whiny bitch” stuff. Remember when Janet Reno showed up on SNL in response to their portrayal of her? During a “Janet Reno’s Dance Party” sketch, the real Reno punched through a wall Hulk-style and finished out the sketch. It was an absolute riot. And why did she do it? She has a sense of humor. If Palin had showed up on SNL to debate Tina Fey and they both sat there flubbing the exact same easy questions, it legitimately could have turned the election around.

Conservatives, for all their tough-guy bullshit, are a phenomenally self-pitying, victimizing bunch, it seems. If you roll with the punches and laugh with the crowd, it makes you look good. If you screech and cry and demonize the person who told the joke, you look like a little baby. Plus, if you’re planning on running for president, you might want to buckle the hell up and get ready for that because that’s how every national-level politician gets treated.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the end of the Palin saga, but it’s turning into a beautiful microcosm for all that’s wrong with the right-wingers in 2009.

COLMES: You don’t think the President of the United States, Barack Obama, cares about protecting this country.

SCHEUER: No, I don’t. Because I don’t think he realizes what the world is like outside the United States. [...]

COLMES: You don’t think he wants to protect the country?

SCHEUER: I don’t think he can, sir. [...]

COLMES: He doesn’t want to protect the country?

SCHEUER: Not if it costs votes.

I’m not even sure how he thinks that works. Does he think a terrorist attack wouldn’t cost votes? Does Al Qaeda only target Republicans or something?

The problem is that not everything is an apocalyptic calamity, and I don’t think ol’ Helen Thomas has quite managed to separate them. It seems like the press is in an absolute uproar over the fact that a writer on the Huffington Post was allowed to ask a question, causing Helen Thomas to (no shit) accuse the Obama administration of being worse than Nixon in terms of media control.

Thomas said she was especially concerned about the arrangement between the Obama Administration and a writer from the liberal Huffington Post Web site. The writer was invited by the White House to President Obama’s press conference last week on the understanding that he would ask Obama a question about Iran from among questions that had been sent to him by people in Iran.

“When you call the reporter the night before you know damn well what they are going to ask to control you,” Thomas said.

“I’m not saying there has never been managed news before, but this is carried to fare-thee-well–for the town halls, for the press conferences,” she said. “It’s blatant. They don’t give a damn if you know it or not. They ought to be hanging their heads in shame.”

Plus a rather amusing exchange between Gibbs, Thomas, and another guy about the administration’s stranglehold on the media. Or something.

Some background here. Nico Pitney is a writer for the Huffington Post. He’s made a heck of a name for himself over the past month by covering the Iranian election with almost frightening intimacy. Constant blogging, videos, a deeper look into the situation than anyone in the “traditional” media has been willing to give it. So the Obama administration, impressed with him, invited him to the press conference to ask about Iran and said they might call on him. No guarantees. This has now been blown up to mean the president is screening questions.

Oh by the way, here’s the “softball” that Pitney threw him.

“Under which conditions would you accept the election of Ahmadinejad, and if you do accept it without any significant changes in the conditions there, isn’t that a betrayal of the — of what the demonstrators there are working towards?”

Ironically, the “screened and preapproved” question that the guy asked was harder and more pointed than anything out of the normal press pit.

Let’s shoot back a few years for one name: Jeff Gannon. Remember that guy? The Bush administration had a man in his press corps that did not work for the media whatsoever (he was actually a male escort) whose job was to sit in the pit and if the press secretary took questions that were too hard, he’d call on Gannon and get an easy one. The guy’s entire purpose was to cut off any line of tough questions. Yet there’s Helen Thomas, screeching about this as though it were the worst thing ever.

Their fundamental issue is somewhat valid, if overblown here. Traditionally, the press corps is called on at random and their questions have in no way been predetermined. The president or press secretary hasn’t told anyone who’ll be called on and doesn’t know what questions are coming. So, on the surface, this is a huge break.

However, again, this wasn’t a case of Obama calling up David Gregory and saying “I’ll call on you first as long as you ask me about my daughter’s first day at school.” He invited a prominent internet reporter on Iran down into the pit to ask about Iran. The difference between the two accusations is a mile wide, and the fact that Gibbs was up at the podium arguing with these two about it is proof positive that Obama doesn’t plan on forcing anyone to toe his line. Even that’s ignoring the fact that Pitney gave a hell of a harder question than anyone else did.

There are a million and one reasons to bitch at Obama. This is totally not one of them. The moment Obama legitimately starts infiltrating and controlling the press I’ll be on him like white on rice, but this is nothing at all.

I defy you to make sense of any of this.

STEELE: Well, you know, I think you raise a very important and frightening concern here, and that is the Democrats have spent the last six to eight years building in place an infrastructure to allow them to basically hijack elections at their whim.

…

Steele claimed that Democratic secretaries of states are working with ACORN in a way “that basically land locks these elections in such a way that they basically walk out of the election with the votes that they need.” He added that “they have activities by groups like an ACORN, or individuals like George Soros through their funding, to help them augment the taking of these elections.”

Honestly, what the hell does any of that mean? What infrastructure? How is Soros’ funding of whoever he wants to fund tantamount to election stealing? What the fuck does “landlock” mean in this example? Why is he still talking about ACORN? Does Michael Steele actually have a clue what he’s talking about?

We talk about “fearmongering” a lot on here and in the liberal blogosphere in general, but let me offer a useful definition. When a politician uses language to cause people to fear certain entities but offers no explanation why, we’re dealing with fearmongering. Saying that Democrats can hijack elections through “activities” and “funding” but not even attempting to say what any of that actually is, that’s fearmongering. To instill fear in people simply for the sake of doing it.

When liberals talked about stealing elections, we had actual justification for it. Diebold machines were notoriously unreliable and hack-prone, caging lists were discovered to toss out ballots, for pete’s sake Tom Delay gerrymandered Texas to solidify Republican rule. We didn’t just throw out names and verbs and act like if we wave our arms enough that supplants the need to explain ourselves.

Steele, in that mess of a rant, basically had conservative Tourette’s. He threw out a bunch of random bogeymen and acted like it made sense. Just because your sentences contain the right parts of speech doesn’t mean you had a coherent thought, and Steele just showed how out of it he really is.

*By the way to “go Palin” means that an individual who had previously been mocked for lacking intelligence, but really might simply have been inexperienced, has proven the criticism not just apt, but understated.

Who would have guessed in 2004, when the “permanent Republican majority” was looking to be cemented and we couldn’t even beat George W Bush when it felt like the entire world was against him, that the pendulum would swing so far in the other direction? A scant two years ago just regaining the majority seemed like a pipe dream, let alone taking control of every branch.

Yet here we are. A Democrat in the White House, a Supreme Court that’s in the process of being re-shaped, a huge majority in the House, and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate that doesn’t even need Lieberman (if you count Specter). The Democratic Party is, for all intents and purposes, bulletproof. If you guys wanted to just trample all over the Republicans and pretend like they aren’t there, you could. There is nothing, at least nothing of substance, to stop you from finally getting all those reforms and policies pushed through.

So let me just say: don’t fuck it up.

Now that the 60 mark has been vaulted, Republicans are going to start howling about “tyranny of the majority”, claiming that now the liberals have a stranglehold on America and are going to be “unchecked” or somesuch, crying that the checks and balances are gone. This is false on its face if for no other reason than the tyrannical majority was elected into office. Those 60 Democrats won their elections. Barack Obama won in a landslide that would embarrass Bush’s piss-poor “mandate”. The American people said with their ballots that we want Democrats to get some things done.

The important thing is to be focused on the long haul, not winning the next news cycle. When the 2010 midterms start rolling around, and especially when the primaries for the next presidential race are under way, the question that Republicans are going to want to sling around is “are we in a better place than we were in 2008?” They’ll want to know if all this time of Democratic tyranny amounted to any actual progress, or if you guys basically sat around with your thumbs up your asses for two/four years.

Right there, my blue donkey friends, is the key point. The Republicans goal is not to force bipartisanship. It’s not even to get their own legislation through because at this point they’ve resigned themselves to impotence (if you doubt that, recall the complete non-plans that were the alternative budget and energy proposals). The GOP knows damn well that they can’t actually get anything they want done, so their goal is to make sure that nothing you want can get done.

Now, we can’t just be entirely uncharitable and say there isn’t an ideological aspect to this. After all, if someone knows they can’t get their ideas adopted, but also believes that the other guy’s ideas are absolute disasterpieces, the obvious solution is to blockade as much as possible. You might not actually put the fire out, but you can keep it from spreading. There definitely is a side of the Republican Party that thinks this way.

That said, you can’t ignore the political reality. Again, recall your position. Filibuster-proof Senate, huge majority in the House, Democratic president. From an outsider perspective, the world is your oyster, as it were. If 2012 rolls around and the economy isn’t booming, if presidential secrecy is still the norm, if the Middle East is still a mess and we’ve still got a few hundred thousand troops in Iraq, it will be comically simple to get all of you thrown out of office in one go: “You see, even with an unstoppable majority, the Democrats couldn’t solve any of our problems.”

For a few years now, Congressional Democrats have proven adept at explaining why you haven’t been able to push through any significant legislation. From 2006 to 2008 it was the lack of a Democratic president and a majority too small. For the past six months it’s been that without Al Franken it’s still not filibuster proof. Well now you have it. Politically speaking, you have no one to blame for a lack of success but yourselves. The Republicans quite literally cannot stop any bill from being passed as long as the Democrats band together. You can’t whine about filibusters or vetoes any more.

This isn’t just a call to arms, it’s also a note about responsibility. You don’t have a safety net any more. The fate of the country is now entirely laid upon your shoulders. Any boosts of the Dow or spikes in unemployment are going to be seen as a result of Democratic, and only Democratic, action. There won’t be any opportunity to say “we wanted to do that but…” without looking like terribly ineffective politicians, which unfortunately you’ve proven to be over the past eight years.

I know what you’re thinking. You don’t want to be seen as partisan, as iron-fisted, as unwilling to cross the aisle. Obama was supposed to usher in a new era of politics where everyone comes together, right? That’s adorable and all, but don’t think for a second that all those same Republicans who were placated by a compromise bill in 2009 won’t lambaste the ineffective Democrats in 2012 over the inability of that same bill to fix anything.

From the Republican perspective, forming an armada wins twice if it works: it stops the mean liberals and sets up victory down the road. Don’t get played for patsies, they don’t want compromise. That’s why they gloated about a 0 Republican vote and burned Specter at the stake for daring to defect. But the thing to remember is that they hold no actual power. Whining and wailing in the media is the only weapon they have. Barring the ability to block anything via the legislature, they’re going to try and kowtow you by launching a barrage in the media criticizing a lack of bipartisanship, and if you let it affect what bills you pass, you might as well start packing and planning on a post-Washington career.

Like it or not, my friends of the (D), you’ve got the whole kit and kaboodle now. The ball’s in your court and the other team is sitting on the sidelines. Whatever happens between today and tomorrow is your responsibility. So again, I repeat. Don’t fuck it up.

Love,

Hanlon

Iraqi soldiers paraded through the streets in their American-made vehicles draped with Iraqi flags and flowers, chanting, dancing and calling the pullout a “victory.”

One drove a motorcycle with party streamers on it; another, a Humvee with a garland of plastic roses on the grill.

…

“The American forces’ withdrawal is something awaited by every Iraqi: male, female, young and old. I consider June 30 to be like a wedding,” said Ahmed Hameed, 38, near an ice cream bar in Baghdad’s upmarket Karrada district.

Crucial quote here:

“It is a big joy to see them leaving,” said Abu Hassan, 60, a shop owner. “There might be some more attacks because of struggles between the different parties, but Iraqis are controlling security now. It’s up to our forces now.”

Even if attacks go up a tad, Iraqis themselves are happy because they themselves are the ones in charge of securing it. They’d rather some more violence than another day of American occupation.

I think what’s comically… curious about the above statement is that we have an Iraqi shop owner better embodying Ben Franklin’s famous statement than the American conservative movement. Remember this one? “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” The Iraqis are eager to live by this motto, living a life that’s not quite so secure but one run by their own, and over here we still have politicians squealing about bombing half the country and placing surveillance on every bit of data in the name of “security”.

We’re at a point where we can draw inspiration from the Iraqis and Iranians, folks.